THE Mar Menor lagoon in Murcia is in a ‘critical condition’ following the devastating Gota Fria floods, the regional government has warned.

Thousands of fish and crustaceans have died after suffocating due to the change in the water’s properties following last month’s flooding.

According to the regional environment minister, Antonio Luengo, scientists and experts are desperately trying to find ways to inject oxygen into the coastal lagoon, which is the largest of its kind in Europe.

It comes after 60 hectometres of fresh water carrying sediments poured into the Mar Menor, leaving the lower layers without oxygen.

“The situation right now is critical, fishers association of SSF has decided to close the fisheries, thousands of European eels are dead in the coast line (an endangered species which finds refuge in the Mar Menor).”

State wildlife experts are investigating a large fish kill at Myrtle Grove. Thousands of dead pogies, catfish and crab surfaced at the canal, and the boat launch all day, just days after Hurricane Barry’s storm surge moved out.

First it was Barry and the floods that followed. Now fishermen in this prime area are having to deal with a smelly large fish kill at a popular boat launch.

Pearl Young, who has fished the Myrtle Grove marina for years, said she didn’t like what she saw today, or smelled.

She fished right off the dock and had little luck, while others went farther out to find clean water.

The fish kill comes just days after Hurricane Barry pushed storm surge into this area. Huge sandbags used to shore up the levee are visible from the launch and many say it’s not unusual to see dead fish like this after tropical weather.

Thousands of pungent-smelling dead fish were visible hundreds of yards from the launch, but fishermen went out anyway to try their luck and checked their spots.

Crabs are the latest casualty of Southwest Florida’s lingering red tide problem as hundreds of them have washed up dead or dying on beaches in Collier and Lee counties since Saturday.

Billy Norris, a Naples resident and owner of Pale Horse Fishing Charters, was at Bonita Beach Monday where he saw masses of dead crabs.

“They were all crawling out because I guess they couldn’t breathe in the water,” Norris said. “Then they were dying on the beach. The sheer amount of them was pretty amazing.”

On Wednesday, Bonita Beach’s water was a rusty, red color and its shore was still littered with crab claws and dead or dying crabs of different sizes and species including blue crabs, Atlantic horseshoe crabs, calico crabs and Cuban mole crabs.

Bonita Beach in Lee County is not the only area where dead crabs are washing ashore. Connie Deane, a Collier County spokeswoman, said dead crabs have had to be cleaned up at all Collier beaches since last Saturday.

(Oregon Coast) – More strange finds on the Oregon coast this week: yet another rare squid and massive amount of crabs were found on the beaches lately. (Photos courtesy Tiffany Boothe, Seaside Aquarium).

More strange finds on the Oregon coast this week: yet another rare squid and massive amount of crabs were found on the beaches lately. (Photos courtesy Tiffany Boothe, Seaside Aquarium).

A whole lotta dead Dungeness crabs are washing up as of late, and it has some a little concerned.

Some of it is just the usual crab molting that happens right about now: beaches this time of year can be flooded with the empty shells of crabs that have shed their outer layer as part of their normal growth process.

But many of the crabs are simply dead carcasses, with their meaty bodies still inside the shells. It’s an unusually large amount of them: just about every beach on the Oregon coast is strewn with hundreds of them, sometimes thousands.

The culprit is a simple upwelling. This is when cold water gets churned up suddenly by a certain set of weather conditions and it brings up gobs of things from the bottom. This is definitely responsible for all the crabs washing up.

However, are there more dead crabs than usual? Is something causing them to die off in bigger numbers, or is it just that the ocean bottom got scoured a bit more than usual?

Cannon Beach’s Haystack Rock Awareness Program thinks it is an unusual amount of dead bodies mixed in with the molts, according to their Facebook posts. They believe it’s quite possible there’s a bigger die-off than usual.

There is evidence this is just a normal upwelling event and not a die-off, however. Seaside Aquarium education specialist Tiffany Boothe said she has found lots of other things as well.

“Along with the dead crabs we are also seeing a lot of tube worm casings, mole crab molts, and hatched out snail eggs,” she said.

A trip to Catalina Island this week became a lesson in marine biology, with tiny red crabs washing ashore in the thousands and dozens of kids working tirelessly to try to save them by returning them to the sea.

Micah Stovall, of Huntington Beach, took a quick vacation to Catalina with family in town from Tennessee when they noticed the small creatures along the shore and in the shallow waters at the main beach in Avalon.

Stovall knew right away what they were: small crabs that look like tiny lobsters or crawfish. He had ventured with his family two years ago to Balboa Island in Newport Beach when hundreds of thousands of them blanketed the shore.

The Pleuroncodes planipes, also known as pelagic red crabs or tuna crabs, are about one to three inches long. They are usually found off Baja, but warm water in the past few years has pushed them up to Southern California in large numbers, especially along the Orange County coastline. Before then, the crabs hadn’t been seen in the area for decades.

While El Nino was credited for the invasion the past few years, the water has returned to normal, colder temperatures this year. But a south swell in recent days has helped push warm water to the coastline, in many areas boosting water temperatures near 70 degrees.

Their sudden appearance can be a headache for maintenance workers as they try to scoop up the mostly dead creatures that leave a strong stench when they wash ashore and bake in the sun for too long.

In June 2015, they showed up in the hundreds of thousands from Huntington Beach to Dana Point. Last year, they appeared at Dog Beach in Huntington and parts of Newport Beach in May.

Mike Pisani, municipal operations director for the city of Newport Beach, said he has not seen any washing ashore on local beaches — yet.

“It probably means they are coming though,” he said upon hearing they were washing up on Catalina.

In some cases, for beaches that are in protected zones that have strict restrictions on removing creatures, there’s no choice but to wait until the tides wash them away or sea gulls feast on them, leaving less-than-ideal conditions for beachgoers looking for pristine sand to lay their towel out on.

Todd Mansur, captain for Dana Wharf Sportsfishing and Whale Watching, said he’s seen them offshore in deeper waters near Catalina.

“They are all over the place,” he said.

But he’s unsure if they’ll reach Southern California beaches.

“South swells, murky waters, different currents will probably keep that stuff off the beaches for awhile,” he said. “It’s unlikely coming any closer because of the conditions we have.”

Julianne Steers, director of husbandry at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, said a research group saw the red crabs in big numbers two miles from Dana Point last week.

“We had a massive collection of them, more than 100 pounds,” she said. “Our net was full.”

While most were returned to the ocean, a few were kept for research.

“We release them, but we usually take a few so we have them to study and learn from for those who can’t get out in the field to see them,” she said. “When we have that quantity of them, we let them live out there and let them continue to be part of the food chain.”

Whether they’ll come washing ashore on local beaches is unknown.

“It just depends on where the swell will be heading,” she said. “It’s a combination of the two — the swell and the currents.”

Spencer Gilbert, a Los Angeles County lifeguard, said they aren’t carpeting the beaches on Catalina like they did last year, but they are “definitely making an appearance.”

He said thousands of them started showing up Sunday, and people have been collecting them in buckets and dumping them back in the ocean.

Stovall’s 8-year-old triplets, other family members and about 100 other children helped in the effort.

“My girls were fearless, they were stoked on it,” he said.

He didn’t dampen the kids’ efforts with the harsh reality of Mother Nature.

“The lifeguard said, ‘You can try as hard as you want. They are open-ocean animals. They are done,’” Stovall said.

Josephine Chubbs was shocked on Dec. 17 to see a large number of sea creatures wash up on the beach near her Norris Point home.

Chubbs lives in an area known as Deckers Cove. “Our backyard is right on the ocean,” she said by phone Monday.

Dec. 17 had been a day of nasty weather that brought high seas and pretty cold temperatures. While snowblowing her husband picked up a lobster right in their driveway and brought it in the house. Not long after he went inside and told Chubbs to dress warm because they had to go down on the beach.

There they found hundreds of sea creatures washed up by the sea.

“I’ve seen caplin rolling, but never seen lobsters and connors and starfish and crab,” she said. “It was everything washing ashore.”

She estimates there were 100 lobsters alone. “It was babies, from two inches to measured (harvestable) lobsters.”

Chubbs, who is the custodian at the Bonne Bay Marine Station, was ready to do what she could to get the creatures to the tanks at the marine station, but everything was dead. “There was nothing that I could help save.”

She later called Bob Hooper, the retired MUN professor is the founding director of the station and still volunteers there, to get his thoughts on the discovery.

From the pictures she sent, Hooper was struck that there was a mixture of species, so he feels the creatures were not killed by a disease.

“Everything looked very healthy, apart from being dead,” he said.

He also noted that all the creatures washed up reach their northern limit in Newfoundland and are not things that are found in Labrador.

“The significance of that is it suggests that cold is the problem.”

He’s seen mortalities dozen of times between the fall and this time of year related to water temperatures getting close to and below freezing.

“Even it goes down a fraction of a degree it might make the difference between a connor being alive and a connor being dead.”

He said the loss is probably worse than it looked, as it’s possible more creatures than what washed up were affected, but hopes it’s localized to the shoal waters in front of Chubb’s house.

He’ll be looking to confirm his hypothesis on what happened when he visits the marine station in the next while to download data gathered by a temperature recorder he has there.

An astonishing and unexpected spectacle was experienced this morning in this port, with the appearance of hundreds of crabs on the shore of the beach of the municipal agency of Salinas del Marqués.

The phenomenon, according to the local people, is due to the currents of cold water that causes the crustacean to look for the shore and the waves expel it to the beach.

The apparition occurred on the salt flats of the Salinas del Marqués, where hundreds of people came to appreciate the fact. Some families were collecting them and carrying them, in buckets, jabas or coolers. This is the first time that this phenomenon occurs, two years ago dead fish also appeared on the shore of this beach.

Among the things Eric Hewey discovered washed up on the beach near Savary Park in Digby County were these starfish. (Eric Hewey)

Halifax resident Eric Hewey was home in Digby, N.S., visiting for the holidays when he got a call from friends on Boxing Day summoning him to the beach below Savary Park in nearby Plympton.

“They said we’ve got to come down and look at the beach.”

On Tuesday Hewey described what he found when he arrived at the beach as sad: lots of dead herring — an ongoing and as yet unexplained problem — but also dead starfish, lobsters, bar clams, scallops and crabs.

ed Leighton is a retired veterinary pathologist who has been tracking the dead herring reports.

He hadn’t been to the beach to see the most recent findings, but he’s seen Hewey’s pictures and noted it’s a place dead herring have been found before.

“It’s a very striking and terrible scene,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.

Leighton said he’s most struck by the assortment of species Hewey and others found on Boxing Day. Other than most likely all being from the bottom of St. Mary’s Bay, Leighton can’t see any other obvious link.

While he has no idea what caused the kill, Leighton said the fact it cut across so many different species likely rules out some kind of infectious disease, because they tend to have a narrow range.

“A particular virus, for example, might affect several different species of fish but it’s unlikely to affect people and it’s unlikely to affect clams.”

His first question is whether it has anything to do with the death of the herring. Leighton doesn’t know, but he also noted herring have been dying for more than a month but this is the first time anyone has reported anything like this.

“It would seem to be at least a new phenomenon, but since we don’t know why the herring are dying, we can hardly say with any surety that, ‘Well, these other things can’t be dying of that.’ So I think we have to be open-minded about this.”

Leighton said it needs to be determined if this has happened anywhere else and it also needs to be confirmed that all of the animals on the beach in Plympton did, in fact, come from St. Mary’s Bay.

Researchers need to get to the bottom of the bay and see what’s happening, he said.

“In a die-off of water-dwelling creatures like that … one of the first things you want to do is go out to where it is happening and measure everything you can about the water, because that’s what they live in.”

It’s also the only way to know if the environment is changing, he said.

Leighton noted the most recent discovery and discussion are the result of “citizen scientists,” such as Hewey, and posts on social media. He hopes people keep patrolling the beaches and reporting any findings.

“That will really help us think through the kinds of things that might have caused it.”